Raising Cain...

On the 150th anniversary of the largest mass execution in US history, 60 riders from South Dakota reach Reconciliation Park in Mankato, Minn.

Today, after a 300-mile ride from Crow Creek, South Dakota, 60 people -- some of whom are ancestors of 38 Dakota men who were hanged on December 26, 1862 by order of President Abraham Lincoln -- reached Reconciliation Park in Mankato, Minnesota, to hold a ceremony on the 150th anniversary of the largest mass hanging execution in US history.

I first learned about this dark piece of history a couple of days ago, Christmas Eve. I decided to watch the film made about the first ride -- Dakota 38. I was so uplifted by the story of this healing journey that I wrote about it on my In Hawk Space blog and shared it on Facebook as my 2012 Christmas greeting.

In that post, I focused on just a few thoughts that the film stirred up. Today my process with the film and the event continues to unfold. Discussion in the last teleconference call of a psychoanalytic class I'm taking this semester turned to the intergenerational trauma that all people living in North America share. I have been interested in this subject for awhile, but the idea has taken on near-passion status for me in the last year or so. It's a wonderful triple intersection of my practice of psychoanalysis, my volunteer work as a justice activist, and my interest as a spiritual student in the idea of raising Cain.

It was clear to me from the film that these Native Americans, from their own experience of oppression, know that we are all traumatized, and that the way through it is to reconnect with our own pasts and work together to find new ground so that we, both as individuals and a human family, do not keep paying the trauma forward.

I'll be sharing more on this notion of intergenerational transmission of trauma in future posts.

For more coverage of the ceremony in Mankato today see also:

Dakota Indians mark hangings of 1862 with trek on horseback (Yahoo News, 12/26/12)

150th anniversary of the Dakota 38 hanging -- Photo Gallery (Mankato Free Press, 12/26/12)

Related articles

Dakota Indians remember largest mass hanging in US history

Santee tribe to honor anniversary of executions

Dakota Indians mark hangings of 1862 with trek on horseback

Interview: Attawapiskat Chief Therese Spence asks for respect for aboriginal peoples

Attawapiskat First Nation Chief Therese Spence is now on her 16th day of a hunger strike. Spence says her strike is ultimately about respect: for treaties and for aboriginal peoples. As such she thinks she deserves a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Harper, as well as the Queen's representative in Canada. Here's an interview she gave on December 21st, 2012:

 

 

See also:

Idle No More: Indigenous-Led Protests Sweep Canada for Native Sovereignty and Environmental Justice (Democracy Now, 12/26/12)

Amid holiday feasting, Chief Spence's hunger strike stays aimed at Harper (Ottawa Citizen, 12/26/12)

Related articles

Canada's 'Idle No More' Movement Spreads Like Wildfire

Attiwapiskat chief rebuffs Patrick Brazeau as Idle No More blockade of CP Rail line heads into fourth day

David Palumbo-Liu: The need for the other narrative in Gaza

I keep a framed print in my office: It depicts a cat just sitting peacefully (I can't remember the artist). The caption is: "What people need is a good listening to."

I have proven this true time and again -- at least for myself -- not only in my healing practice but in the practice of peace work and justice activism out in the troubled world beyond my quiet holler here in Tennessee. Thus, I was happy to find an amazing OpEd by David Palumbo-Liu at truthout.org yesterday.

Since then, I've spent quite some time deciding where to share it. The thoughts and feelings that have prevented a quicker sharing relate to an indepth (and ongoing) contemplation of the fractured communities, the violence, anger and hate that currently blinds us as a human collective to our essential oneness, our peaceful, loving and cooperative nature.

I think a lot about how we can ever heal all the wounds that keep us from a reunion with the Self and the Source that we as a human race abandoned so long ago. I think we will figure it out. Social healing is a complex process, but I am confident that one of the skills we'll all need is an ability to listen through the heart first, and only then let the words pass on to the head through that powerful field of compassion that allows us to hold extremes simultaneously in one center.

Palumbo-Liu's article offers an opportunity to practice such a thing and to learn more about it, I think. He speaks here about young people in Gaza, but it's clear to me that we could take such an invitation to deep listening anywhere on Earth right now and move ourselves toward something better:

Believing their story is never allowed to be heard, Palestinians have a feeling of dispossession described most eloquently by the late Edward Saidi.  Now Gazan youth are pleading for the world to listen to their rage, sorrow and frustration, and their commitment to a cultural and political project that will endow them with rights and possibilities for life.

via truth-out.org

I discovered more great posts at David Palumbo-Liu's website. He also has a Twitter feed @palumboliu. When I get a minute, I'll add his website URL to Raising Cain's News and Blogroll in the sidebar.

 

Lawrence Davidson: America's Ku Klux Klan Mentality

Lawrence Davidson's article addresses the dimension of increased hate group activity toward American Muslims as an element of ongoing racism in the United States...

While today the Ku Klux Klan as an organization is nearly (but not quite) gone, it would be a mistake to think that the Klan mentality is dead in the U.S. Quite the contrary. The nation’s deep-seated history of racism has helped preserve an apparent permanent subset of Americans who grow up with prejudicial feelings against anyone they perceive as a threat to their version of the “American way of life.”

This background can help us understand the  ongoing attacks against American Muslims.  Since 2010 there has been an increase in the number of attacks on American Muslims, their mosques and other property, as well as American minorities (such as Sikhs) who are regularly mistaken for Muslims.

These attacks are not the work of a refurbished Ku Klux Klan but, nonetheless, have about them the same nature: fear of American Muslims as cultural subversives (for instance, the delusion that they seek to impose Sharia law in the United States); anonymous threats of violence (via telephone, Internet, and also in the form of abusive graffiti); bomb, arson, and gun-fire attacks on property; and finally assaults and murders.

Read more of the story at www.alternet.org

Project Empire: How Anti-Muslim Sentiment is Used to Justify Imperial Adventures | | AlterNet

Interesting article...Deepa Kumar addresses conservative and liberal manifestations of "Islamophobia"...much to consider here if you think we can and must create a just society for all:

The term “Islamophobia” became known to Americans after the September 11 attacks. Whether it was efforts on the left to combat anti-Muslim sentiment or efforts on the right to attack Muslim-Americans and deny that there was something called Islamophobia, the term was here to stay.

But if we only look at anti-Muslim sentiment post-9/11, we would miss a lot. In fact, as Deepa Kumar shows in her new book Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, set to be released next month, the production of Islamophobia has a long history.

via www.alternet.org

More thoughts about Trayvon Martin and what it is that must not be named

Well, I think there might be another word to add to my list of stuff that can't be named: lynching.

In Trayvon Martin and the Deadly Legacy of Vigilantism, Jamilah King interviews Koritha Mitchell about her book, Living with Lynching. Mitchell talks a little bit about Without Sanctuary, James Allen's collection of lynching photographs:

The history of lynching in the U.S is really horrific and painful for a lot of black Americans. Why was it important for you to tell this story, in particular?

As painful as it is, we have not necessarily shied away from it — which I think is a good thing. One of the ways we haven’t shied away from it is through our support of and our facing it through the “Without Sanctuary” exhibition — those gruesome lynching photographs which had a stint at the Martin Luther King, Jr. center in Atlanta. That was one of the bigger moments where people really remarked upon how much black families were coming to it and using it as a way to grieve losses through generations.

What I found is that by using those photographs only as our way of trying to grapple with what lynching meant in our nation’s history, we really did ourselves a disservice. We weren’t able to engage with what black people who survived this violence had left us in terms of understanding what the violence meant.

The “Without Sanctuary” photographs are a big reason of why it was important for me to tell the story through the lynching plays because the lynching plays tells us exactly what the photographs cannot tell us because the photographs are from a white perspective. You needed to be somewhat safe at the lynching to take those photographs. You’ve got this isolated black victim surrounded by a mob of righteous-looking whites and that is all that we knew about lynching. But the construction of those photographs is very specific: it’s to make sure that you think this was an isolated man who didn’t have any connection to community. The plays give us a sense of just how connected to community and family those victims were.

via colorlines.com

I happened to see this exhibit when it was at the King center in Atlanta. A few years later I tried to write about it in the post that launched this blog...but I couldn't do it...I couldn't find the words. So I was very interested in Koritha Mitchell's comments on it, and generally how the interview connects some dots between Trayvon Martin's death, and a broader issue of the collective, historical trauma that vigilante actions imposed on African Americans as a group.

What Mitchell says about the photographs representing a white perspective, and the intention of the photos to make us think that "this was an isolated man who didn’t have any connection to community" added some critical pieces to my reflections on Trayvon Martin's murder. This is exactly the point I was making about the power of worldview in relation to maintaining broken systems. The photographs reflect a belief system sees the world as fragmented, isolated parts without connection to the whole. And such a world is deadly.

The other process that speaks to me through Mitchell's words is that of healing and transformation. In the social healing of oppressor-oppressed relationships, there is work that has to be done by each group within itself, and work that will not be complete without collaborative effort. Both pieces are essential. To collaborate effectively, I as a member of the oppressor group have to come to terms with my ancestral linneage and the ways in which I still am consciously or unconsciously identified with the oppressor's worldview. Through collaboration, all of us share dreams, stories, art, action and community that brings valuable new insight to the worlds of self and other, oppressor and oppressed.

I'm still not sure what to say about my experience viewing the "Without Sanctuary" exhibit, but I'll start with this: There is a certain trauma that comes with the realization of horrors perpetrated on another human being by one's own group. Opening up to that is difficult, and I think one thing "Without Sanctuary" represented for me is a point of no return. I can't go back to ignorance of what happened. I can only keep moving forward as fast as I can stand it.

In my practice of healing (working on my own stuff and helping others do the same), I've learned that perhaps the best thing any of us can do for healing the whole of humanity is to find and embrace our shadow selves, rather than to continue to project them onto someone else. As we have the courage to own who we are and where we came from -- no matter if we are the oppressed or oppressor -- we break the chains that have keep all of us bound together in hate and fear rather than love.

Shattered Families: new investigative report presents first national data on perilous intersection of immigration enforcement and the child welfare system

The Applied Research Center has just released "Shattered Families: The Perilous Intersection of Immigration Enforcement and the Child Welfare System," a groundbreaking report offering the first national data available on the perilous intersection of immigration enforcement and the child welfare system. ARC's Investigative Research package includes a poignant video and Colorlines.com articles which bring to life the story of one family trying desperately to stay together.

Key Findings: There are at least 5,100 children currently living in foster care who are prevented from uniting with their detained or deported parents.

• If nothing changes, 15,000 more children may face a similar fate in the next 5 years.
• This is a growing national problem, not one confined to border jurisdictions or states-- ARC identified at least 22 states where these cases have emerged.
• Families are more likely to be separated where local police aggressively participate in immigration enforcement.
• Immigrant victims of domestic violence are at particular risk of losing their children
• ICE detention obstructs participation in Child Protective Services' plans for family unity.
• Most child welfare departments lack systemic policies to keep families united when parents are detained or deported.

Federal, state and local governments must create explicit policies to protect families from separation.

These polices should stop the clock on the child welfare process and the immigration enforcement process to ensure that families can stay together and allow parents to make the best decisions for the care and custody of their children. 

via arc.org

 

ARC is offering a free webinar on the Shattered Families report on November 10th.

 

Violence Interruptors bring a cease fire to American streets

I came across this awesome group today:

 

 

Here are some links to more info:

CeaseFire website

Article on a documentary about the CeaseFire project: The Interrupters

DOJ Evaluation of CeaseFire

CeaseFire on Twitter

CeaseFire on YouTube

 

I have major objections to the "disease model" approaches and "learned behavior" explanations on which CeaseFire is constructed. But as a former EMT, I also know that when our kids are dying in the streets, you stop the bleeding first. Then you (or people who focus on how to shift collective worldviews) can attend to the evolutionary theories and long term solutions that will clear the planet of violence altogether.

It takes love, courage and a clear sense of "life threatening emergency" to work on the frontlines of American violence. I think the Interrupters of CeaseFire are real heroes.

The Storm Isn't Over: An Interview with "Floodlines" Author Jordan Flaherty

Interesting article by Alissa Bohling who interviews the author of Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six:

Like many of the journalists who cover stories about injustices that disproportionately affect people of color, Jordan Flaherty is white. And while Flaherty's diligence in acknowledging his racial privilege is not unique among these writers, the graceful yet matter-of-fact tone he uses to discuss his privilege sets a new standard for anyone seeking to address race while working for social justice - an effort without which, said Flaherty, quoting a colleague in a recent speech, "you simply become a more skillful racist."

via www.truth-out.org

Jordan Flaherty is also presenting with the Community and Resistance Tour that seeks to communicate about current struggles for justice and liberation, from the current BP Oil Drilling Disaster devastating the Gulf Coast to nooses hung in the northern Louisiana town of Jena.

WHY what’s happening to Muslims in America Affects YOU - Jack & Jill Politics

I'm posting this before I start writing the next piece in my series, World as Dream, World as Mirror, because this post today from Jack and Jill Politics was a piece of somebody else's lived-experience-dream that I needed in order to move forward in mine. Please read the whole post for appropriate context because I am just excerpting the part that wired the connection for me.

Excerpt from the end of rikyrah's post:

We know what they mean when they talk about the ‘ Muslims’….

we know the dogwhistles…we’ve been taught to recognize them a mile away.

What’s the difference between a torched mosque in Tennessee and a string of torched Black churches throughout the South?

You honestly think they’ll stop with Muslims?

Please.

You’ve been Black in America longer than 3 days.

via www.jackandjillpolitics.com